The world, America specifically, learned that many workers don’t do anything productive enough that it affects the whole economy, especially if the buying power of those people is not diminished. Apparently, millions of restaurant workers don’t provide anything that doing without has the same affect: no servers, no entertainers, no bartenders required, and only enough cooks to meet the diminished demand. Same result for almost all low-tier jobs: no janitors, no attendants, no groomers; though yard maintenance seemed unaffected. The biggest tell is the lack of need for almost all public service workers. Whatever it was they did, which was difficult to discern even before the lockdowns, has been totally exposed as redundant, or possibly even counter-productive.

Lockdowns made bare the unpleasant fact that America pays a lot to instill work ethic into its population; tens-of-millions of worthless jobs that might be better left undone except for the social value they bring. All can easily be supplanted by simply handing over free money. This brings up the question of how many workers actually do something? And how many of them can be expected to support everybody else? Is it one-in-ten? One-in-hundred? What percentage of America’s citizens, and non-citizens alike, can stay at home to watch television, play videogames, and sit in their dark bedrooms pretending to be somebody on social media without affecting productivity, as long as the check’s in the mail.

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